When I run outa things to investigate
Couldn’t imagine doin’ anything else
So now I’m sittin’ home investigatin’ myself!
Hope I don’t find out anything . . . hmm, great God!
--Bob Dylan
Source of Anti-Government Extremism
May 27, 2013
Exclusive: The Right’s hostility to “guv-mint” is not new. It traces back to the South’s fears that any activism by the national government, whether building roads or providing disaster relief, would risk federal intervention against slavery and later against segregation, perhaps even the end of white supremacy, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
One reasonable way of looking at democratic governance is that it carries out the collective will of a society, especially in areas where the private sector can’t do the job or needs regulation to prevent it from doing harm. Of course, there are always many variables and points of disagreement, from the need to protect individual rights to the wisdom of each decision.
But something extreme has surfaced in modern American politics: an ideological hatred of government. From the Tea Party to libertarianism, there is a “principled” rejection – at least rhetorically – of almost everything that government does (outside of national security), and those views are no longer simply “fringe.” By and large, they have been embraced by the national Republican Party.
There has also been an effort to anchor these angry anti-government positions in the traditions of U.S. history. The Tea Party consciously adopted imagery and symbols from the Revolutionary War era to create an illusion that this contempt of government fits with the First Principles.
However, this right-wing revision of U.S. history is wildly askew if not upside-down. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution – and even many of their “anti-federalist” critics – were not hostile to an American government. They understood the difference between an English monarchy that denied them representation in Parliament and their own Republic.
Indeed, the key Framers – James Madison, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton – might be called pragmatic nationalists, eager to use the new Constitution, which centralized power at the national level, to build the young country and protect its fragile independence.
While these Framers later split over precise applications of the Constitution – Madison opposed Hamilton’s national bank, for instance – they accepted the need for a strong and effective federal government, unlike the weak, states’-rights-oriented Articles of Confederation.
More generally, the Founders recognized the need for order if their experiment in self-governance was to work. Even some of the more radical Founders, the likes of Sam Adams, supported the suppression of domestic disorders, such as Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts and the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania. The logic of Adams and his cohorts was that an uprising against a distant monarch was one thing, but taking up arms against your own republican government was something else.
But the Tea Partiers are not entirely wrong when they insist that their hatred of “guv-mint” has its roots in the Founding era. There was an American tradition that involved resisting a strong and effective national government. It was, however, not anchored in the principles of “liberty,” but rather in the practice of slavery.
Southern Fears
The battle against the Constitution and later against an energetic federal government — the sort of nation-building especially envisioned by Washington and Hamilton – emanated from the fears of many Southern plantation owners that eventually the national political system would move to outlaw slavery and thus negate their massive investment in human bondage.
Their thinking was that the stronger the federal government became the more likely it would act to impose a national judgment against the South’s brutal institution of slavery. So, while the Southern argument was often couched in the rhetoric of “liberty,” i.e. the rights of states to set their own rules, the underlying point was the maintenance of slavery.
This dollars-and-cents reality was reflected in the debate at Virginia’s 1788 convention to ratify the Constitution. Two of Virginia’s most noted advocates for “liberty” and “rights” – Patrick Henry and George Mason – tried to rally opposition to the proposed Constitution by stoking the fears of white plantation owners.
Historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg recount the debate in their 2010 book, Madison and Jefferson, noting that the chief argument advanced by Henry and Mason was that “slavery, the source of Virginia’s tremendous wealth, lay politically unprotected” and that this danger was exacerbated by the Constitution’s granting the President, as commander in chief, the power to “federalize” state militias.
“Mason repeated what he had said during the Constitutional Convention: that the new government failed to provide for ‘domestic safety’ if there was no explicit protection for Virginians’ slave property,” Burstein and Isenberg wrote. “Henry called up the by-now-ingrained fear of slave insurrections – the direct result, he believed, of Virginia’s loss of authority over its own militia.”
Henry floated conspiracy theories about possible subterfuges that the federal government might employ to take away black slaves from white Virginians. Describing this fear-mongering, Burstein and Isenberg wrote:
“Congress, if it wished, could draft every slave into the military and liberate them at the end of their service. If troop quotas were determined by population, and Virginia had over 200,000 slaves, Congress might say: ‘Every black man must fight.’ For that matter, a northern-controlled Congress might tax slavery out of existence.
“Mason and Henry both ignored the fact that the Constitution protected slavery on the strength of the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the slave trade clause. Their rationale was that none of this mattered if the North should have its way.”
Madison, a principal architect of the new governing structure and a slave-owner himself, sought to finesse the Mason/Henry arguments by insisting that “the central government had no power to order emancipation, and that Congress would never ‘alienate the affections five-thirteenths of the Union’ by stripping southerners of their property. ‘Such an idea never entered into any American breast,’ he said indignantly, ‘nor do I believe it ever will.’ …
“Yet Mason struck a chord in his insistence that northerners could never understand slavery; and Henry roused the crowd with his refusal to trust ‘any man on earth’ with his rights. Virginians were hearing that their sovereignty was in jeopardy.”
Right to Bear Arms
Despite the impassioned arguments of Henry and Mason – and after Madison gave assurances that he would propose amendments to address some of these concerns – Virginia’s delegates narrowly approved the Constitution on a 89-79 vote.
The key constitutional revision to allay the fears of Southern plantation owners was the Second Amendment, which recognized that “a well-regulated Militia [was] necessary to the security of a free State,” echoing Mason’s language about “domestic safety” as in the protection against slave revolts.
The rest of the Second Amendment – that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” – was meant by definitions of the day to ensure the right to “bear Arms” as part of a “well-regulated Militia.” Only in modern times has that meaning been distorted – by the American Right – to apply to individual Americans carrying whatever gun they might want.
But the double-talk about the Second Amendment didn’t begin in recent years. It was there from the beginning when the First Congress acted with no apparent sense of irony in using the wording, “a free State,” to actually mean “a slave State.” And, of course, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” didn’t apply to black people.
The Second Congress enacted the Militia Acts, which mandated that military-age “white” men must obtain muskets and other supplies to participate in bearing arms for their state militias. Thus, the South was guaranteed its militias for “domestic safety.”
Yet, the South still faced the broader political imperative of constraining the power of the federal government so it would never get so strong that it could end slavery. So, during the early decades of the Republic, leading Southern politicians tried to sabotage many of the federal plans for strengthening the United States.
For instance, when James Madison pressed ahead with his long-treasured plan to use the Commerce Clause to justify federal road-building – and thus improve national transportation – he was mocked by Thomas Jefferson for his excessive support of government, as Burstein and Isenberg noted in their book.
In the years after the ratification of the Constitution, Madison gradually pulled out of the Washington-Hamilton orbit and was drawn into Jefferson’s. The key gravitational pull on Madison was Jefferson’s opposition to federal initiatives grounded in the agrarian interests of the slave-owning South.
Madison’s realignment with his Virginia neighbor, Jefferson, bitterly disappointed Washington and Hamilton. However, after Jefferson gained the presidency in 1801, he and Madison joined in one of the biggest federal power overreaches in U.S. history by negotiating the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France – despite the absence of any “enumerated power” in the Constitution that envisioned such an act by the central government. [For more on the politics of the Founding era, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Racism and the American Right.”]
March toward War
As the national divisions over slavery sharpened, the South escalated its resistance to federal activism, even over non-controversial matters like disaster relief. As University of Virginia historian Brian Balogh noted in his book, A Government Out of Sight, Southerners asserted an extreme version of states’ rights in the period from 1840 to 1860 that included preventing aid to disaster victims.
Balogh wrote that the South feared that “extending federal power” – even to help fellow Americans in desperate need – “might establish a precedent for national intervention in the slavery question,” as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne noted in a May 22 column.
As it turned out, the fears of Patrick Henry, George Mason and like-minded Southerners proved prescient. The federal government would become the enemy of slavery. As the United States grew in economic strength, the barbaric practice became a drag on U.S. global influence.
With the election of Abraham Lincoln from the anti-slavery Republican Party, Southern states saw the writing on the wall. Defense of their beloved institution of owning other human beings required extreme action, which manifested itself in the secession of 11 Southern states and the enactment of a Confederate constitution explicitly enshrining slavery.
The South’s defeat in the Civil War forced the Confederate states back into the Union and enabled the Northern states to finally bring an end to slavery. However, the South continued to resist the North’s attempts to reconstruct the region in a more race-neutral way. The South’s old aristocracy reasserted itself through Ku Klux Klan terror and via political organization within the Democratic Party, reestablishing white supremacy – and oppression of blacks – under the banner of “states’ rights.”
There were, of course, other American power centers opposed to the intrusion of the federal government on behalf of the broader public. For instance, the Robber Barons of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries used their money and their political influence inside the Republican Party to assert laissez-faire economics, all the better to steal the country blind.
That power center, however, was shaken by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. Recognizing the abject failure of the “free market” to serve the nation’s broader interests, the voters elected Franklin Roosevelt who dealt a New Deal that stimulated the economy, imposed securities regulations and took a variety of steps to lift citizens out of poverty.
In the post-World War II era with the United States asserting global leadership, the South’s practice of racial segregation became another eyesore that the federal government haltingly began to address under pressure from Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. By the 1960s, the South had lost again, with federal laws prohibiting racial segregation.
But the momentum from these two government initiatives – intervention to create a more just economy and racial integration – helped build the Great American Middle Class and finally fulfilled some of the grand principles of equality and justice espoused at the Founding. However, the energy behind those reforms began to fade in the 1970s as right-wing resentment built.
Finally, in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the combined backlash against Roosevelt’s New Deal and King’s new day prevailed. Too many whites had forgotten the lessons of the Great Depression and had grown angry over what they viewed as “political correctness.” Over the last several decades, the Right also built an imposing vertically integrated media machine that meshes the written word in newspapers, magazines and books with the spoken (or shouted) word on TV and talk radio.
This giant echo chamber, resonating with sophisticated propaganda including revisionist (or neo-Confederate) history, has convinced millions of poorly informed Americans that the Framers of the Constitution hated a strong central government and were all for “states’ rights” – when nearly the opposite was true as Madison, Washington and Hamilton rejected the Articles of Confederation and drafted the Constitution to enhance federal power.
Further, the Right’s hijacking of Revolutionary War symbols, like yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, confuses the Tea Party rank-and-file by equating the Founding era’s resistance against an overseas monarchy to today’s hatred of an elected U.S. government.
Amid this muck of muddled history, the biggest secret withheld from the American people is that today’s Right is actually promoting a set of anti-government positions that originally arose to justify and protect the South’s institution of slavery. The calls of “liberty” then covered the cries of suffering from human bondage, just as today’s shouts of outrage reflect resentment over the first African-American president.
Intelligence Report, Spring 2013, Issue Number: 149
Bringing Back Birch
Don Terry
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — In a hotel near the outer limits of California’s capital, just down the hall from the pain management conference and the baseball card show, three banquet tables along the back wall of the Cherrywood Room are covered with dozens of books, magazines and DVDs expressing the rightist of right-wing views of the world.
There’s Call of Duty, a paperback about the “sterling nobility” of Robert E. Lee and his lost cause. There’s Exposing Terrorism, a treatise declaring that Islamic terrorists are actually old-school, Moscow-directed Marxists in Muslim masks. On the next table is a volume titled Just Say No to Big Brother’s Smart Meters: The Latest in Bio-Hazard Technology.
There’s a pamphlet on homeschooling, instructions for “saving freedom,” a DVD about the horrors of “ObamaCare,” and several pamphlets, DVDs and books detailing the evils of the United Nations and its sinister scheme to create a New World Order through Agenda 21, a nonbinding U.N. resolution designed to encourage nations to pursue “sustainable’’ green growth and land use development efforts.
The John Birch Society emerged from an Ozzie-and-Harriet period of American history, but soon grew too fond of baseless conspiracy theories to remain in the political mainstream. Now, however, Birchers are making real gains again and spreading their ideas far and wide. FRANCIS MILLER/TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES
On this foggy Saturday morning, a few weeks before Christmas, there’s something for sale to suit almost every rightist predilection — almost.
A man steps up to one of the tables and asks, “Do you have anything by George Soros?’’
The woman handling the money looks as if she has just been slapped.
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” he says, raising his palms in surrender to apologize for mentioning the liberal billionaire in mixed company.
Another man taps the would-be wisecracker on the shoulder.
“Hey buddy,” he says. “They do have The Communist Manifesto. Will that do? There’s a stack of them over there.”
“Are you serious?” the jokester asks, turning thoughtful. “I guess that makes sense. It’s important to know how the enemy thinks.”
The John Birch Society publishes the Manifesto and sells it for six bucks a pop at gatherings of its conspiracy theory-loving, U.N.-hating, federal government-despising, Ron Paul-supporting, environmentalist-bashing, Glenn Beck-watching true believers, attending, in this case, a luncheon celebrating the group’s 54th anniversary.
After more than five decades of secret socialist plots and accusations of treason at the highest levels of American government — these are the people who once called President Dwight Eisenhower a communist — the arch-conservative John Birch Society is still waging its Cold War-era crusade against the Red menace and American “insiders” who, in the society’s view, are hell-bent on handing the country over to the socialists at the U.N.
“I can remember back in the early ’60s, there were people who were saying the John Birch Society wouldn’t achieve its 10th anniversary,” John McManus, the president of the group, tells the luncheon audience of more than 100 mostly gray-haired people. “Of course, they were hoping that would be the case. Well, I’m pleased to announce all those people who said that are dead and we’re still functioning and functioning quite well.”
Once Again, the Commies
In a bit of political symmetry, the John Birch Society headquarters is located in Appleton, Wis., about two miles from where the remains of Sen. Joseph McCarthy are buried on a serene bluff overlooking the Fox River. The great American commie hunter died in 1957, cut down by a conspiracy of acute hepatitis and alcoholism.
Across town at the Birch Society, the senator’s spiritual kin soldier on from two single-story buildings connected by a subterranean passageway on a bland commercial strip. There, the society publishes its magazine, The New American, and runs a website that lists the group’s various “action projects,” including its campaign to stop Agenda 21. The website also includes weekly video updates presented by the society’s CEO, Arthur R. Thompson, who, sitting in the group’s underground TV studio made up to look like a book-lined study, has covered in recent weeks such topics as “ObamaCare Supports Euthanasia,” “Zombie Attack” and “Russia Rising.”
Communing with the enemy: John Birch Society CEO Arthur Thompson consented to an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which his organization has long branded as a “Marxist” group. PHOTO CREDIT: DON TE
In an interview with the Intelligence Report in his Appleton office, Thompson, an affable, white-haired man from Seattle who constantly fidgets with his glasses, twirling them in his fingers as he talks, said that two of the hardest “sells” the society has to the American people are that “communism is alive and flourishing” and “what is behind terrorism.”
The answer, Thompson said, is Russia, and it “is so obvious, it’s incredible.”
“While we’re sitting here proclaiming communism is dead, it’s growing everywhere and rapidly,” he said. “It’s flourishing under different names, like the Muslim Brotherhood.”
At least some Americans appear to be buying what the Birchers are selling. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney raised more than a few eyebrows during the 2012 campaign when he said that Russia — not Iran, not North Korea — was, without question, America’s No. 1 geopolitical foe. Anxiety about Russia is straight out of the John Birch Society playbook of fear. For them, the wall is still up, the Cold War still raging.
Race and the Society
Once considered by the right and the left as the political equivalent of an addled uncle sent down to the basement rec room to drink, rant and hopefully pass out before saying anything too nutty in front of the guests, in recent years the John Birch Society has been invited back upstairs and has even hosted a dinner party or two. In 2010, the society was a co-sponsor of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. “It’s a fallacy to say that we ever went into hibernation,” Thompson said in the interview with the Report. “We’ve always been active. We’ve always influenced the conservative movement. We just don’t bang the drum and wave the flag about everything we do.’’
But as has been the case for much of its up-and-down existence, the society often sticks its big right foot in its mouth and is again nudged towards the basement. That’s bound to happen sooner rather than later if the editors of The New American continue to publish on its website the kind of commentary they did two days after 20-year-old Adam Lanza stormed into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14 and gunned down 26 people, including 20 first-graders who were only 6 and 7 years old and six educators.
Under the headline, “‘Root Causes’ and Mass Murderer Adam Lanza,” The New American commentator, Jack Kerwick, bemoaned the fact that absence of meaningful gun control was widely discussed in the aftermath of the mass shootings but that the “root causes” of too many abortions and too few executions in the United States never “made the cut.”
Then Kerwick turned to Lanza’s race and gender. “From ‘affirmative action’ to massive Third World immigration,” Kerwick wrote, “from media depictions of white men as either ignoramuses or crazed ‘racists’ to the incessant barrage of giddy proclamations of an ever-diminishing white America, the assault on white men is comprehensive.
“Is it impossible to believe,” he asked, “that a young white man such as Lanza, who has been exposed to this systematic abuse his entire life, may not have been consumed with both self-hatred and rage? For that matter, may not his cultural animus toward whites have figured in Lanza’s choice to leave a trail (judging from news photos) of mostly-white bodies?’’
Near the end of the piece, Kerwick swears he’s being facetious. It’s a lame attempt that sounds painfully like the old John Birch Society. It’s not, however, the John Birch Society William Grigg knows. Grigg was an editor and writer at The New American for years until he was fired in 2006 in a dispute with management about his private political blog postings.
Grigg attended anti-war rallies in Appleton and played lead guitar in a rock and roll band, Slick Willie and the Calzones. Despite being fired, Grigg said in a series of E-mails that he still believes in the principles of the society’s founder, Robert Welch, has a “continued affection” for the group’s volunteers and field staff, and a low opinion of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the current leadership of the Birch Society.
“In my experience it was practically impossible to find a volunteer or staffer who could honestly be described as ‘racist,’” said Grigg, who is of Mexican and Irish descent. “At one speech I gave in San Diego back in 1997, the chapter leader who acted as emcee was a black female ex-Marine, the invocation was given by a local African-American pastor, and the Mexican/Irish speaker was introduced by another chapter leader of ‘Native American’ ancestry. Granted, this wasn’t a typical meeting of its kind, but I had more than a few experiences that were quite similar.’’
It’s because of those experiences that he became so angry that Kerwick’s commentary appeared in The New American. “It is incomprehensible to me,” Grigg said, “that JBS would run such a specimen of ethnic grievance-mongering anytime — let alone in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity at Sandy Hook Elementary.’’
Racist roots: The John Birch Society today denies any racial or anti-Semitic animus, but it wasn’t always so. The society joined others on the far right in accusing Martin Luther King of attending a “Communist training school” in the 1960s. WILLIAM LOVELACE/GETTY IMAGES
Charges of racism and anti-Semitism have dogged the John Birch Society since its earliest days. It opposed civil rights legislation in the 1960s, saying the African-American freedom movement was being manipulated from Moscow with the goal of creating a “Soviet Negro Republic” in the Southern United States. The society was a close ally of Alabama’s segregationist governer George Wallace and reportedly had 100 chapters in and around Birmingham, Alabama’s largest city, as well as chapters across the rest of the state. Thompson, the group’s CEO, said the society has never been either racist or anti-Semitic, going so far as to add that once a member is discovered to harbor such views he or she is immediately “booted out.’’
Grigg said Thompson and McManus should be booted out. The men took over leadership of the society in 2005 after a bitter internal power struggle, an ugly coup, as some describe it, that saw the ouster of the previous regime. Grigg said the two men are prisoners of the past and are holding the society back. “The society remains a monolithic, top-down organization in an age of social media,” he said. “At a time when most politically aware students and young adults are worried about the economy and the accelerating erosion of civil liberties, the JBS management remains obsessed with the supposed strategic threat posed by Russia.’’
During its height in the 1960s, the society may have had as many as 100,000 members, still well short of Welch’s oft-stated goal of 1 million Birchers. But few know for sure how many Birchers exist today. Then and now, the group’s membership rolls are a closely guarded secret. “We’re not vast numbers,” Thompson told the banquet. “We’ve never been vast numbers. You don’t need to be vast numbers. You just need to be the dedicated few, who are focused on doing the same thing, at the same time, with the same intellectual arguments to the right people.”
From Welch to Koch
Robert Welch, who founded the John Birch Society in 1958, named his group after an American intelligence officer executed by the Chinese shortly after the conclusion of World War II. AP IMAGES
The John Birch Society has been knocked down and counted out numerous times since it was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, a brilliant, wealthy former candy manufacturer, high-ranking Massachusetts Republican Party official and board member of the ultra-conservative National Association of Manufacturers. The society was named after an American missionary and Army intelligence officer executed by the Chinese days after World War II. One of the society’s first members and major backers was Fred Koch, a multimillionaire businessman, who left a fortunate to his sons. David and Charles Koch have become the billionaire sugar daddies of today’s American right.
“Welch was really quite smart in terms of business models,” said Chip Berlet, a writer and researcher who has been following the John Birch Society for more than 30 years. “The Birchers were one of the first right-wing groups that did computer-generated mail, keeping track of the issues by computers. But JBS was so universally condemned by people on the left and right, Welch really doesn’t get credit for using data tracking to organize people.”
Bob Dylan wrote a song about the society that summed up a widespread view, “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” in the early 1960s, around the time patrician right-wing writer William Buckley famously called for the group to be banished from the conservative movement for being too extreme, a danger to both the Republican party and the country. Once a Birch ally, Buckley finally uncapped his poison pen and went after the Birchers in the pages of his magazine, The National Review, when it was revealed in the early 1960s that Welch had accused Eisenhower of being a communist.
“Being banished from the conservative movement and being banished from the National Review-approved conservative movement are not the same thing,” Jesse Walker, who, as a senior editor at the libertarian-leaning Reason Magazine and Reason.com, writes about political paranoia among other topics. “John G. Schmitz ran a basically Birchite third-party presidential campaign in 1972 that got over a million votes. That’s a lot of people who don’t take their marching orders from Bill Buckley,’’ he said in an E-mail interview.
In 1980, a few days before Ronald Reagan was elected president, the society’s public relations director, according to The Associated Press, characterized the conservative Republican as a “lackey” of Communist conspirators. The public relations director at the time was none other than John McManus, who is now the president of the Birch Society.
“We’re up against a conspiracy,” McManus told the Birch birthday bash in Sacramento. “People say, ‘You sound like a conspiracy theorist.’ I say, ‘No, no, no. I’m a conspiracy fact-ist.’”
JBS and the GOP
Inside the GOP tent these days, with a black man in the White House and the rest of the country browning more deeply with each generation, the line between the radical right and the conservative mainstream is increasingly difficult to discern.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” McManus chortled at the banquet, “the influence of the John Birch Society has exploded in the last couple of years.”
He was not just whistling “Dixie.”
“The John Birch Society has been aced out of a direct role because they are a political third rail of conservatives and the right wing,” Berlet said. “They have been marginalized by the leadership of the right because of their conspiracy theories. But a lot of the right wing of the Republican Party was and is highly influenced by the John Birch Society. Step one in understanding the Birchers is that they are not that much more far out, compared to other people on the right.’’
Some of the longtime Bircher ideas and themes that have slipped into the conservative mainstream and now sound like Republican talking points include, according to Berlet, the belief that big government leads to collectivism which leads to tyranny; that liberal elites are treacherous; that the U.S. has become a nation of producers versus parasites; that the U.S. is losing its sovereignty to global treaties; that the “New World Order” is an actual plan by secret elites promoting globalization; and that multiculturalism is a conspiracy of “cultural Marxism.”
But Walker, the Reason editor, does not see the society as especially “influential in the inner circle of the GOP.” The Birchers, Walker said in an E-mail, are often “deeply hostile to a wide range of policies the national Republicans have embraced.”
“It’s worth noting,” he added, “that the JBS has evolved with the times; the modal Bircher of today and the modal Bircher of, say, 1964 would not see eye to eye about everything. It was interesting in the 1990s to watch as a group that we tend to associate with hawkish anti-Communists suddenly discovered its inner isolationism, opposed the first Gulf war, and generally moved toward a stance of skepticism toward military interventions abroad.”
New Bottles, Old Wine
Back from the Birchers: Claire Conner grew up among leading lights of the society, but completely rejected its views later in life. COURTESY CLAIRE CONNER
At 67, Claire Conner has been watching the John Birch Society up close and very personal for most of her life. Conner was once right-wing royalty, a princess in the court of Welch. Her father was a member of the 25-person national council of the society for 32 years. He was the first official Bircher in Chicago. Her mother was the second. They signed their daughter up when she was 13. Welch often stayed at their home when visiting the city on Birch business. “He was kind of off-putting when you first met him,” Conner said. “You expected this giant of a man. He had sinus problems and was forever coughing into a handkerchief. When he gave a speech, he just read it. But he was brilliant, and, at the dinner table, he was very animated.’’
Conner long ago turned her back on the society. Today, she is an unabashed, proud, Obama-loving liberal. She has written a funny and sometimes sad book about growing up Birch called Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America’s Radical Right that is due to be released by Beacon Press in early July. She worries that her fellow liberals are making an old mistake, underestimating the John Birch Society and its ability to “create havoc.”
“I always say to my liberal friends you better stop laughing at these people and pay attention,” she says. “The ideas that you hear today coming from the right were generated in the ’60s by the John Birch Society. It’s new language, but the same ideas. In terms of the intellectual framework of the GOP, it’s the Birch Society every single day.”
She says liberals are still celebrating Obama’s re-election while the Birchers and the rest of the right are back at work. One lost election or 20 years of lost elections, she says, won’t discourage them. “If anything,” she says, “they’re going to be energized. They really believe President Obama is part of the socialist revolution that began with FDR. So, they’re going to dig in their heels. They’re going to get busy and stay busy. As the kids say, that’s how they roll.”
FRI JAN 04, 2013 AT 08:59 PM PST
Birch Society Republicans: America Now Has Three Major Political Parties
bybontemps2012Follow
We are seeing a measurable fracture, a two-part breakage to the Republican Party. This results from infiltration of the GOP based on contributions from the same families and sources of money that financed the John Birch Society from the beginning. Birchers in the House are pursuing JBS goals and recycling old-time JBS slogans.
This is the Birch Society, not the populist Tea Party from 2009.
Effectively, based on "Fiscal Cliff" votes and the changeover to 2013, we have three distinct caucuses in the House of Representatives:
-- Regular Democrats (now 201 Members)
-- Business Republicans (84 Members)
-- Birch Society Republicans (150 Members)
Birchers are anti-government, anti-immigration, anti-compromise, and opposed to taxes in all forms and appearances. The Bircher billionaires' agenda is not the mainstream Republican businessmen's agenda.
The Koch family helped found the John Birch Society. They have financed Birchers since 1984 and remain the prime backers for these Bircher Republicans. They assure that JBS ideological slogans and xenophobic paranoia define Bircher campaigns.
Bircher infiltration of the Republican Party (1984-2004 and 2010) is covered in comments from our Jim P and others. As well an array of pro-Birch Society comments from ernie1241 are worth the price of admission by themselves.
Meanwhile President Obama has set about playing off the House's Bircher and Business Republicans against each other. Significantly, Obama has timed his alternating "Cave"/"No Cave" messages during "Fiscal Cliff" negotiations to maximize the Bircher schism.
Email: Business Republicans are now a minor party at 19% of the House.
For more on the emergence of the Birchers as a political party, read on below le chignon d'orange.
National leaders for this Birch Society Republican party are reported as Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and Marco Rubio. The earlier populist Tea Party people have quit the game, more than not. One of the co-founders, Mark Meckler, was arrested at New York's LaGuardia Airport and charged with felony possession of a weapon, for trying to get a pistol onto an airliner. Michele Bachmann is the chairman of the 60 Members of the more populist Tea Party Caucus in the House.
Nationally these Bircher Republicans show up pushing traditional John Birch Society positions, often using language that goes back decades. These positions range from eliminating use of fluoride in drinking water to opposing the teaching of evolution to anti-communism and anti-Islam to cutting off use of non-real estate tax revenues to help educate minority students.
Their public statements and the language of the Bills they pass in the House of Representatives fall far outside the bounds of mainstream Bush or Reagan or Eisenhower Republicanism. Still, JBS approved candidates began to achieve success as early as 1984. They replaced normal conservative Republicans steadily through 2004 and then made further inroads in 2010.
The official Tea Party Caucus has 60 members. Hard core Birchers show up with approximately 150 votes on key issues.
Large sums of money flow into some 250 congressional races. The propaganda arm of this movement has centered, in recent years, on Freedomworks. Dick Armey, Jack Kemp, C. Boyden Gray, Bill Bennett, Matt Kibbe, and Steve Forbes served as the familiar right wing mavens. Koch money goes for such as $10 million worth of campaign paraphernalia bearing modernized JBS slogans.
Bircher Republicans say, increasingly, that they are willing to shut down the day-to-day operations of the federal government, to default on debt payment, and to freeze all actions in Congress. Pursuit of the Bircher billionaires' agenda is what matters.
You would be hard pressed to find one elected national-office Democrat who is on board for the main elements of the Bircher agenda. Sixteen Democrats voted against this recent fiscal deal, but none of them are Birchers. (Alan Grayson in Florida helped fund Peg Dunmire. She served as an unwitting False Flag candidate, presenting as a Bircher-Fascisti. She attracted racist voters from a mainstream Republican opponent.)
A typical Bircher Republican reaction to the "Fiscal Cliff" vote is provided by Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina:
"We have not cut spending. In fact, the one place we were supposed to cut spending was on the sequester [and associated measures.] But that got delayed. So our question as conservatives is, when are we going to start this battle over spending? We've waited two years now. We're not going to wait much longer."
Background
The Birchers have run the country to the edge of default and over this "fiscal cliff." What does it take to make a political "battle" in their eyes?
The goals you see in their slogans are difficult to translate to law, except for fighting taxes:
· Honor the Constitution
· Reduce the size and intrusiveness of the government
· Stop raising taxes
· No more bailouts or crony capitalism
· Repeal Obamacare
· Cease out-of-control spending
· Reduce the national debt
· Bring back American prosperity and jobs; and as noted by spud1,
· Restore traditional American values
Of course they oppose any and all jobs bills. Their ideas for traditional values run to bigotry, gun-nut fantasies, and a Pax Americana global militarism.
They demonstrate no awareness of the management issues that underlie the big long-term budget issues. They never say a word about the Big Buck problems: medical expenses for chronic care and elderly disabled patients; the "mission creep" that has driven military spending since the Korean War; and our failure to keep up America's infrastructure of bridges, anti-drought reservoirs, and the like.
"No awareness" is the key. Bircher candidates go out of their way to maintain Know Nothing status. At public events they refuse to answer questions. They never publish position papers or endorse professional work that establishes planned-and-budgeted government policy alternatives.
They like prayer. They do not like government action. And that is the prime drive of 150 Members of this 2013 session of the House of Representatives.
Essentially they are hostile to democracy, which for the United States of America developed from the sceptical, reality-testing premises of the Enlightenment. Here is the text, written by Gouverneur Morris as head copywriter of the 1787 "committee of style" (supporting the legal work of James Madison), that set forth our core goals and named the country:
Preamble to the Constitution
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
These Birch Society Republicans oppose large-scale government actions that would either "establish Justice" or "promote the general Welfare." They would stop at setting up police and sufficient schools to turn out some number of students with passable literacy.
They were perfectly willing to go to the barricades to eliminate a simple CDC program to get rid of poisonous lead in the environment. The lead is thorooughly documented as poisonous. It affects millions of children. The Birchers would have none of it for federal lead abatement.
Slogans
They are careful to keep their analysis statements to one-liner slogans. Here are the slogans that win top place in one of their polls:
· Dear President Obama, Did They Accept Our Apologies?
· It Is When People Forget God That Tyrants Forge Their Chains (Patrick Henry)
· George Soros, Puppet Master
· God Has Given Us a Christian Nation (John Jay, 1st US Chief Justice)
· U.S. Out Of U.N.
· We Are Not Tolerant of Treason!
· Public Schools: Leftist Re-Education Camps
· An Education Without the Bible Is Useless (Noah Webster, Founding Father)
· Liberal Congress: Killing Our Economy and Raising Unemployment, Since 2006
· Seal The Borders NOW
· If Liberals Could Win an Election, Why Would They Need So Much Voter Fraud?
· Sheriff Joe Arpaio - A Real American!
· GOP Leaders, You Are the Problem! We Don't Want Moderates!
· BUILD THE FENCE
· It Isn't the Quanity (Term Limit), Its the Quality (Character)
· Loss of Sovereignty At Core of Obama Agenda
· Background Checks and Questionaires for All Politicians, Judges
· We Want an In-Depth Investigation of Soros, Obama, and Acorn!
· Get 'em Out Now! Every Day They Destroy America More!
· Mainstream Media, Hollywood - Guilty of Treason? Yes, They Are!
· Don't Expect Wicked Men to Pass Good Laws
· Clean Up the National Voter Registration System Up Now!
· Thank God for the 2nd Amendment
· Remove the RINOs from the Republican Party!
· Bring Family Values Back From Liberal Perversions
· Spend Our Taxes on National Security, Not Liberal Stupidity!
· Wipe Voter Roles Clean! Re-Register "Legal" Voters Only!
· Impeach Obama!
· O.B.A.M.A. = One Big A** Mistake, America
Apart from references to Soros and Obama, this could be the 1950s Birch Society. "Quanity" is a misspelling. Might have been done by the "moran" guy. And the alleged quote from John Jay is bogus.
Plus that Noah Webster opposed religious education, developed his famous dictionary, and was a supporter but not a participant in the founding of the country. He served Alexander Hamilton by editing the Federalist Party's newspaper from 1793 and then continued successfully in the newspaper and printing business in New York.
The slogans attack the U.N., gun control, moderate Republicans, public schools, Hollywood, and a perceived wickedness in the elected officials of our democracy.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s one of the big John Birch Society themes of the day argued that the Supreme Court had a majority of "secret Communists." These guys today do not get to repeat that claim.
Elections
So that is what you've got for the Third Party. They are what they do.
The presidency is likely out of reach for them. As with Senate seats in the larger-population states, excepting Texas and Florida, there is too much publicity generated with the presidency for Birch Society Republicans to win a general election.
Presidential primaries are at the balance point. You could see a Bircher win a primary.
Low-population states' Senate seats are another matter. Rural House seats and Bible Belt seats are also winnable for these candidates. Where the winning total is under 500,000 votes and education level is below average, expect Birchers to do well.
State and local elections are raw meat for their candidates. Beware your local school board. They feast on low turnout elections.
Examples
The Deb Fischer campaign in Nebraska is typical of successful efforts. She offered no discrete policy proposals, repeated the same dozen slogans throughout, and ended up taking 57.8% of the popular vote (455,593 ballots) over Bob Kerrey.
Nebraskans think she is a centerist.
Similarly, Minnesota's 2nd Congressional District is represented by John Kline. They have no idea how he votes on issues. His campaigns echo Bircher slogans, but omit the anti-immigrant rants to achieve a 54.1% victory (193,586 ballots.) There is no local coverage for his actions in Congress.
People there in MN-02 think John Kline is a centerist.
In fact he gets a 97.8% rating on the right. That is about as far right as you can find, as most of these congressmen vote for "left" bills that support their local businesses and regional initiatives. For the fiscal deal, Kline voted with Boehner. Publicly he spoke against compromise with Obama.
It's all a shell game. Birch Society Republicans get campaign contributions from far right billionaires. For those functions they present as Americanize "Fascisti" with fundamental opposition to democratic ideals. They target other contributors bound up with Fundamentalist religiosity and all-out tax avoidance.
They are threats to win seats. They hold at least 150 House seats now and likely have a dozen more Members who backed the fiscal compromise for reason of expediency.
Political Status
This is a strong political party. They may or may not see themselves as a distinct party. They run as a pack, not as a disciplined political party.
The Bircher clast is not like your father's Republican Party. It is the John Birch Society in word and deed. They conceal their agenda -- like Deb Fischer and John Kline -- and present publicly as moderates and good compromisers.
It is in too-large a part the "nut cases," such as the hate-driven bigots that Barry Goldwater worked to remove from his own conservative movement during the 1970s and 1980s.
It is fundamentally destructive.
Obama has succeeded in enhancing this split in his opposition by sharpening the self-identification of Members who vote in the Bircher caucus. Whether the split widens or goes back to status as a hidden fault line remains to be seen.
Obama has worked an effective strategy. He starts out issuing public statements that appear to "cave" on policy issues. Then a day or so later there follow detailed policy proposals from his Cabinet that undo the "caves" and infuriate Business Republican leadership. Political analysis within the two Republican camps is driven to utter confusion.
Birch Society Republicans, more than not, have had no idea what was going on. Birchers do not participate in negotiations.
As the Bircher came to distrust their Business Republican partners, they broke off in mid-December and formed their own political clast.
Obama has to know that the Birchers have no strategy whatsoever for their actions in the House of Representatives.
Birchers in the House have the one mainstream tactic: they vote against taxes. Nothing if not predictable. Even that tactic is in trouble, come March of 2013, because the debt ceiling and the "sequester" deadline are now set for the same day.
Consider the language of Obama's position on the debt ceiling:
President Obama in his weekly address, Honolulu, Hawaii.
January 4, 2013.
And as I said earlier this week, one thing I will not compromise over is whether or not Congress should pay the tab for a bill they’ve already racked up. If Congress refuses to give the United States the ability to pay its bills on time, the consequences for the entire global economy could be catastrophic. The last time Congress threatened this course of action, our entire economy suffered for it. Our families and our businesses cannot afford that dangerous game again.
The main backers of the Business Republicans will need to see expensive alterations to the "sequester" deal to satisfy their donors -- not possible without offsetting tax increases. Obama presents these revenue increases as "closing loop holes."
Business Republicans also have no use for Bircher squabbles related to the federal debt limit. Their backers live and die by NYSE stock prices.
"Divide and conquer" goes back to Julius Caesar and to Phillip II of Macedonia before him. You betcha, Barack Obama is aware of the concept.
...........
Speaking of John Birchers, it seems fairly clear they play a large role in Bachmann's politics. From Lizza's article:
Around this time, Bachmann became interested in the writings of David A. Noebel, the founder and director of Summit Ministries, an educational organization founded to reverse the harmful effects of what it calls “our current post-Christian culture.” He was a longtime John Birch Society member, whose pamphlets include “The Homosexual Revolution: End Time Abomination,” and “Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles,” in which Noebel argued that the band was being used by Communists to infiltrate the minds of young Americans. Bachmann once gave a speech touting her relationship with Noebel’s organization. “I went on to serve on the board of directors with Summit Ministries,” she said, adding that Summit’s message is “wonderful and worthwhile.” She has also recommended to supporters Noebel’s “Understanding the Times,” a book that is popular in the Christian homeschooling movement.
And then there is J Steven Wilkins.
Wilkins is the leading proponent of the theory that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North. This revisionist take on the Civil War, known as the “theological war” thesis, had little resonance outside a small group of Southern historians until the mid-twentieth century, when Rushdoony and others began to popularize it in evangelical circles. In the book, Wilkins condemns “the radical abolitionists of New England” and writes that “most southerners strove to treat their slaves with respect and provide them with a sufficiency of goods for a comfortable, though—by modern standards—spare existence.”
African slaves brought to America, he argues, were essentially lucky: “Africa, like any other pagan country, was permeated by the cruelty and barbarism typical of unbelieving cultures.” Echoing Eidsmoe, Wilkins also approvingly cites Lee’s insistence that abolition could not come until “the sanctifying effects of Christianity” had time “to work in the black race and fit its people for freedom.”
Here's a more recent example of Wilkins' belief structure, from a recent blog post decrying the minimum wage:
It works this way: If I’m a business owner, I might be willing to hire 4 unskilled workers at $4.00 per hour until they learn the job and prove themselves capable and dependable and worth a raise. But if you force me to pay a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, I might hire only two new employees (or I might hire no new employees in hopes that my present workers can take up the slack). So, instead of having 4 teenagers earning $4.00 per hour, now only two have a job and two have nothing (unemployment increases).
But what is especially unspoken (and consequently largely unknown) is that the evil effects of raising the minimum wage hit young black teens the hardest. In 2007 (when the latest hikes in the minimum wage began to be put in place), the unemployment rate among black teens was 29 percent. Today (after the minimum wage hikes) that rate has risen to almost 42 percent. Thanks to the “wisdom” of Congress the number of unemployed black teens is almost 13 percent higher than it was four years ago (according to a report in today’s Wall Street Journal)
Got that? Minimum wage raises the unemployment rate of young African-Americans. Because evidently too many employers think...what? Either he's arguing that the "markets" don't value the African-American labor force enough to pay them more than slave's wages (yes, I intended that term), or they're not worth a minimum wage in the first place. Therefore, we as a society are supposed to reward that by slashing the minimum wage down to pre-1970 levels. It boggles the mind.
Perhaps the final and most bizarre Bachmann belief is her slavish devotion to liberty. Liberty defined by Bachmann, anyway.
Liberty is the concept—or at least the word—most resonant with the Republican Party’s Tea Party faction, which Bachmann’s Presidential aspirations depend upon. It is a peculiarity of the current political moment that a politician with a history of pushing sectarian religious beliefs in government has become a hero to a libertarian movement. But Bachmann’s merger of these two strands of ideology is not unique. In fact, the Pew Research Center, in its recent quadrennial study of the American electorate, noted that “the most visible shift in the political landscape” since 2005 “is the emergence of a single bloc of across-the-board conservatives. The long-standing divide between economic, pro-business conservatives and social conservatives has blurred.”
[...]
The two wings are now united by the simplest and most enduring strain of conservative ideology: a dislike and distrust of government. Religious and fiscal conservatives have been moving toward this kind of unity for decades, and Bachmann, in her crusades against abortion, education standards, gay marriage—as well as in her passionate opposition to raising the debt ceiling—has always cast government as the villain, often using terms that echo Schaeffer’s post-Roe warning that America risked falling into the hands of “a manipulative and authoritarian élite.
........
”
Well, I was feelin’ sad and feelin’ blue
I didn’t know what in the world I wus gonna do
Them Communists they wus comin’ around
They wus in the air
They wus on the ground
They wouldn’t gimme no peace . . .
So I run down most hurriedly
And joined up with the John Birch Society
I got me a secret membership card
And started off a-walkin’ down the road
Yee-hoo, I’m a real John Bircher now!
Look out you Commies!
Now we all agree with Hitler’s views
Although he killed six million Jews
It don’t matter too much that he was a Fascist
At least you can’t say he was a Communist!
That’s to say like if you got a cold you take a shot of malaria
Well, I wus lookin’ everywhere for them gol-darned Reds
I got up in the mornin’ ’n’ looked under my bed
Looked in the sink, behind the door
Looked in the glove compartment of my car
Couldn’t find ’em . . .
I wus lookin’ high an’ low for them Reds everywhere
I wus lookin’ in the sink an’ underneath the chair
I looked way up my chimney hole
I even looked deep down inside my toilet bowl
They got away . . .
Well, I wus sittin’ home alone an’ started to sweat
Figured they wus in my T.V. set
Peeked behind the picture frame
Got a shock from my feet, hittin’ right up in the brain
Them Reds caused it!
I know they did . . . them hard-core ones
Well, I quit my job so I could work all alone
Then I changed my name to Sherlock Holmes
Followed some clues from my detective bag
And discovered they wus red stripes on the American flag!
That ol’ Betsy Ross . . .
Well, I investigated all the books in the library
Ninety percent of ’em gotta be burned away
I investigated all the people that I knowed
Ninety-eight percent of them gotta go
The other two percent are fellow Birchers . . . just like me
Now Eisenhower, he’s a Russian spy
Lincoln, Jefferson and that Roosevelt guy
To my knowledge there’s just one man
That’s really a true American: George Lincoln Rockwell
I know for a fact he hates Commies cus he picketed the movie Exodus
Well, I fin’ly started thinkin’ straight
When I run outa things to investigate
Couldn’t imagine doin’ anything else
So now I’m sittin’ home investigatin’ myself!
Hope I don’t find out anything . . . hmm, great God!
